Daily Search Forum Recap: January 16, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Sphinn Announces Spam and Bury, Search Engine Watch Adds Social Media Forum
As you may know, the highly popular Sphinn Internet Marketing Forum is looking for ways to get better. So they're proposing a Desphinn button which will work much like a "Bury" button that you see on other social networks. If you think a post doesn't deserve to be frontpaged, you can downvote it using Desphinn, or so that's the goal. But is it worth it? The current proposal suggests that when you downvote something, you

What's Your Highest Click Through Rate (CTR)?
A WebmasterWorld thread asks how well you're doing on your Google AdWords advertising campaign. What's your highest CTR? One forum member says that he had 7% and after split-testing ads, got a 12% CTR. Others have actually seen 20% CTR. I have to say that this is pretty impressive. Click Through Rates depend on a lot of factors, though. So if you're not doing so well, it's okay. Here are some factors you want to

How Can I Report Spam to Google?
If you see spam in Google search results, you can report it to Google using the Report a Spam Result link. Google claims that they take these allegations seriously and investigates them to see if the results are spammy. A WebProWorld Forums member is wondering, though, if Google is taking heed to his spam report. According to him, there is one company that has multiple websites with duplicate content and they are dominating the front

Google AdSense Team Comes out with Glossary of AdSense Terms
If you're not sure what all that Google AdSense jargon means, you're not alone. Fortunately, the Google team has your back. A Google AdSense Glossary has been posted to Google and covers everything from account type to ad display terms to reports to technical terms. For example: Cost-per-click (CPC) The CPC is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords has a CPC pricing system. If you've heard

Google News Does Not Index Article Updates
A Google Groups thread asks if they publish an article and it is found on Google News, but then want to make a change to that article - will it be updated? The answer is no. Google News crawls the page once and will not come back to look for changes. A Google News representative confirmed this: Currently the crawler crawls a particular article at a particular URL once. So in short, no. You can

Gmail Blank Login Screens For Internet Explorer 7 Users
A Google Groups thread reports and confirms there is a major issue when trying to login to Gmail with Internet Explorer 7. Users with IE7 who try to access their Gmail email are seeing blank login screens, preventing them from accessing their email. Gmail Guide, an official Google Gmail representative has confirmed the issue and offered some work arounds until they can patch the bug. I've got an update -- our engineers have identified the

Editing a Google AdWords Ad, Technically Makes a New Ad
I spotted an interesting tidbit over at Google Groups where we have a Google AdWords API representative give us some deeper insight into how editing ads technically work at Google. Here is a quote from the AdWords API rep: If you've ever edited an ad via the AdWords web interface and you're particularly inquisitive, you might notice that the ad's underlying ID changes after the update. You also might notice that there's a running count

Stop Your Google Ads From Displaying in Gmail
Moderator, Discovery at Search Engine Watch Forums received an email from Google on how to block his ads from being displayed on Google's Gmail. By default, most, if not all, emails you received contain ads along the side that are or should be contextual relevant to the content in your email. Here is an example email from our Search Forum Recaps, which you can also subscribe to over here. What if you, as an advertiser,